As you will no doubt learn the more you navigate around this site, I am a big fan of simcity. While other coworkers and friends of mine can spend hours talking about assorted Mages, Elves, cloaks, daggers and other gaming fun, I prefer the inherent simplicity of essentially being a supreme dictator over my own mini continent and the assorted cities and towns I have built there. Often times in this game real world buildings and landmarks are modeled and added into the game by a dedicated group of players that is still going strong five years after the release of the current incarnation and in spite of a newer addition, but I digress, a couple of months ago a dedicated modeler came up with a collection of 'sky farms' to be used in the game and I thought, what a cool idea, it would be great to do this in real life. Now it appears that other architects and engineers are working on projects of this type.
In the not so distant future it is predicted that as much as 80% of the worlds population will live in urban areas, and by 2050 the population of the world will increase by as many as 3 billion people. Three billion people require a fair bit of food and current farming practices are unlikely to be able to provide the needed supply. Dr Dickson Despommier suggests Vertical Farms, which are at first a radical idea more suited to science fiction, but after consideration is not all that radical at all. After all we have been growing vegetables under green houses for a long time.
Dr. Dickson Despommier’s Vertical Farm website is a clearing house for vertical farm designs and he outlines his vision for what urban farming can and should be What is new is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people. An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate).
Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world's urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.
Dr Despommier goes on to outline multiple advantages to this new vision for farming; things like year round crop production (great for Canada), elimination of herbicides and pesticides, and a reduction in agricultural run off as most vertical farm systems have waste water reclamation systems built in. Not to mention a number of other great points.
Adding a grocery store to the ground floor could eliminate shipping costs for all produce and enable these stores to sell produce that is truly fresh, they wouldn't even have to pick the vegetables prematurely to make them transportable.
The site even has a proposal for Toronto...
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